Читать книгу A Brand New World - Raymond King Cummings - Страница 5

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There was so much happening everywhere in the world during those fateful weeks that followed February 10, 1966—events so startling, amazing, so stupendous of import, and of such diversity that I scarce know how to recount them.

There was a reckless abandonment of defense installations—a frenzied urge for self-preservation, each individual, each family fighting frantically for its survival. The government, in all its branches, was disintegrating. Department after department was abandoned by its personnel. Everywhere, those who should give the orders were scattered, no one knew where.

Orders? To fulfill any orders would have been impossible. And for what? Every government on the Earth was in the process of abandoning its projects, its ramified defenses, recognizing no enemy save that which the elements created.

The world was incoherent—everywhere a chaos of events unprecedented, uncontrollable. And in the chaos which swept Freddie and me away, the news from Dan Cain in Puerto Rico, important though it was, at the time concerned us little.

Father was in constant communication with the Cains; and later, after father had gone to Miami when the Federal capital was moved there in flight from Washington, he went to Puerto Rico.

The announcement that our world was to have such different days and nights, and a climate so utterly changed, struck the public with horror.

It is not my purpose to try to detail or to picture it; the chaos everywhere; the paralyzation of industry throughout the northern hemisphere which so far had been proceeding by man’s will against all the invading efforts of nature to wreck it; the panics that took place in all the northern cities; crowds of refugees struggling to get south; inadequate transportation; accidents; and a horrible crime-wave that swept unchecked over every one of the large population centers.

Human activities in our modern world are very widely diversified; more widely so—and yet more intermingled, more interdependent—than anyone realizes until there comes an upset from the normal.

There is in these modern times nothing that anyone does which does not almost immediately affect what someone else is doing. Had the change come slowly, spread over a hundred, or a thousand or a hundred thousand years as other great world changes have come and passed, conditions would have adjusted themselves. No one would even have noticed the change.

But this was happening in minutes where others had taken centuries. New York, London, Paris and all the cities of the north were doomed to six months of twilight and night and blighting cold. Snow now was upon land, millions of acres of land, where crops soon must grow if millions of people were to have food. Yet now we knew those millions of acres would be for months snow-buried.

Millions of homes soon would be without adequate heat or light, and the people without adequate clothing. Rivers upon which the great power plants depended were congealing into ice.

This for the north, with business, industry and nearly every human activity paralyzed by the sudden public horror. But in the south, from the Equator to the South Pole, lay the land of promise. Or at least the public thought so.

Life lay there—life and the promise of food and warmth and blessed sunlight. For in the far Antarctic south, with the new light and heat coming, millions upon millions of acres of land would be springing into a new fertility to replace what the north had lost. But this, too, was a fallacy; for after a few months, the pendulum would swing back; the far south would go into night and cold.

Many hundred million people, suddenly giving up all their accustomed work in the world’s activities and trying to move to another region! A migration greater than the sum total of all others in the world’s history. In a hundred years of systematic, careful planning and execution it might have been accomplished without disaster. But now it was a panic, a chaos, a flight. Distracted governments tried to cope with it, but they were impotent to bring even a semblance of order.

Our office of the Amalgamated Broadcasters was maintained in New York City until well along in February. With government affiliation, we broadcasted only what might be of help to the public: news of conditions, generally censored to allay too great a fear; advice as to what to do; information concerning transportation; and news from the south. In this work, Freddie now joined me. There were days—almost dark now except for a brief time before and after midday—when he and I were in our cold office, one or the other of us at the microphone throughout the twenty-four hours.

It was an office of incoherent men and disorganized service; without light, some of the time; with frozen and burst heating pipes and no one to repair them. We sat bundled in our overcoats, with snow piling against the windows.

News came of crowds surging in the dark, snow-piled streets; food giving out, with paralyzed transportation; news of raids by the public upon all the markets; news of people trampled to death hourly at every steamship dock, every bridge leading out of the city; uncontrollable crowds at the tunnels, the railroad and plane terminals.

State troopers vainly patrolled streets made almost impassable by snow which now could not be cleared away; people froze in the cold with which they were not equipped to cope; crime was everywhere, with criminals, like ghouls, battening on tragedy.

In those terrible days there were few concerned with astronomy. Yet I recall that one of my orders was to detail—for any who might still be listening—a simple version of how, astronomically, all this was coming to pass.

“Perhaps,” I broadcasted, “when we know the fundamentals of this change—the scientific reasons for it—the thing may hold less terror for us.”

Useless words! Nothing could mitigate the terror!

“You all know in a general way,” I went on, “the astronomical reasons for our alternating day and night—our succession of seasons, spring, summer, autumn and winter. Yet if you follow me closely now, and picture what I tell you, the subject will be clearer to your mind, and you will understand the change which is now upon us. Some of you, our government had advised, should remain in the north and withstand the rigors of the new climate. New York City will not be abandoned! That is absurd! It is the sudden change, the upset to our normal routine, which has now caused suffering.

“When we are equipped for the new conditions, New York and other cities in its latitude will be perfectly habitable. We will have winter nights several months long, and an arctic cold. Then spring, and a summer with the sun giving us months of unending daylight. Those must be our productive months—we must grow food then to supply the southern hemisphere, just as in the other months they must grow food down there.

“Don’t be too hasty! We can’t all—everyone on Earth—rush at once to the Equator! Even there at times it will be too hot, and a twilight winter fairly cold. Cold enough, a month or two from now, to disorganize everything.

“It is your panic, your haste, which is our greatest danger. Be calm! Meet the conditions as they are. Help our government to maintain order, here in the north. The world’s work must be done—the new conditions must be coped with sanely. We are not in desperate distress; only through panic can real disaster come!”

Futile words! But it was the panic of flight—the attempted rush of so many millions of people—the disorganization of all those myriad activities upon which life depends—which was our greatest danger.

Futile words! Impotent governments, themselves disingenuous, for they were all preparing for hasty flight to warmer, more equable regions! On February 22 the National Capital of the United States was moved from Washington, District of Columbia, to temporary housing in Miami, Florida. And even there, the great Florida city was disorganized, snow-covered, with very nearly zero temperature.

The deaths throughout the northern hemisphere that February of 1967 will never be counted. A million? Many million? I would hesitate to guess.

There were some nine million people within the limits of Greater New York on Christmas. By mid-February I suppose there were no more than a scant fifty thousand left—and these, most of them, were trying to get away. A dark, almost deserted, buried city—buried in a white shroud which mercifully hid its tragedy.

I caught one last glimpse of the sun, on the only clear day of that month—the sun at noon just creeping above the southern horizon and then plunging back. The Arctic night was on us.

I saw the highways between New York and Washington, where refugees trudged along on foot, carrying lights in the darkness—plunging through the snow, walking blindly southward when they could go no other way, hundreds falling by the roadside. All the traffic lines were littered with frozen bodies, soon hidden by the snow.

We were not in Washington long; soon we were ordered to Miami. There was a cold gray twilight there which, with the buildings arranged for temporary heating, was at least tolerable. And here we set up our headquarters. The first of March came. Father was in Puerto Rico. I knew by then what strange things were transpiring there in the Cains’ plantation house.

I knew, too, what the astronomers—gathered now at Quito, Ecuador, as the best place in the Western World for twilight observation—had discovered.

Xenephrene was inhabited!

Father was convinced of it the day after that momentous February 10. But the news—and the news from the secluded little plantation house of the Cains—was withheld from the public. But on March 2, everything was disclosed. For our distracted world one culminating blow remained. As though all that had gone before were not enough, fate held one crowning terror.

On March 2 it was broadcast that a hostile race of people in human form had come from Xenephrene and landed on the Earth! Invaders from this brand new world had landed two days before, north of New York, and now were moving south upon the city!